1 Replies - 880 Views - Last Post: 15 May 2014 - 01:12 AM

[link] How to build your own render farm

A super interesting look into setting up a home/small job rendering farm.. quite abit of detail to point you where you need to go for parts, apps, setup, etc. .. now I'll pretend I had the business need to justify this!

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I opt for the 3.0GHz 8-core Xeon E5 v2 machine because, for anything that doesn't stress more than 8-cores—almost everything but 3D rendering or certain video encoders—the 8-core would perform better than the lower-clocked 12-core. I decided to save the $1500 upgrade cost to go from the 8-core E5 v2 that would give me better performance with tasks that couldn't saturate all cores. Instead, I spent a bit of extra money to get another 10-core 3.0GHz Xeon E5 v2 and put that in a machine that will run only during V-Ray for Maya renders.
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If you are looking to build a room full of HPC nodes and are concerned about heat, performance, reliability, etc.—this guide is not for you. This guide is intended for people who just want to get set up with some added networked power, to maybe learn the basics of Linux and remote administration with ssh, and to understand the foundation of networked rendering and workflows.